Monthly Archives: August 2019

When someone invites me in, I often jump. So it is with Ian, who is running a university course called Revolutionary Poets Society, and the name caught my attention when he began sharing it out via Twitter. I’m going to poke around, from out here in the open (Ian will have students in his classroom, I believe).

His first post is a call to create six word memoirs, which I have done more than a few times but always enjoy it (and my sixth graders are working on their own right now as part of a getting-to-know-you activity). Then, Ian asks folks to take it a step further by sharing it with others, and sparking conversations about the word choices and ideas. Maybe inspire others to write their own.

I decided to bring my new six (or seven) word memoir into a relatively new online space — Yap.Net (join in if you want — it’s a closed network for sharing works in progress, etc)– and ask folks for feedback.

First, my words:

I am no longer who I was

Actually, my original six were:

I’m no longer who I was

but the contraction seemed to be cheating, somehow, in my head when I read it to myself and so I broke it out. Which leaves me with seven instead of six.

What does it mean? I was going for the concept of each day brings a different you/me/us — with new experiences and insights — with echoes of the past but a step forward towards the future. Or something like that.

I shared my words out in Yap.Net and posed the technical question: Who or whom? (I wasn’t quite sure, because I thought Whom was technically correct with I as the subject, but it sounded terrible on my lips, while Who seemed wrong grammatically but sounded right on the tongue.)

Well, the grammar query sparked a conversation, with mixed signals, as one friend thought it was Whom but Who was better used, and another friend, self-described grammar queen, stated that Who is right, not Whom. Others jumped in with their own words, including one in the form of a poem and another that reads like a painting on a canvas, and the thread of discussion was neat.

Interestingly, I don’t think anyone called me out for the Seven versus Six.

I’m not a huge badge fan, even though I see the potential. I’ve used Mozilla’s Open Badges over the years to gather together different online badges that either I have earned or created (mostly via CLMOOC but also, in the early days of Thimble and Web Maker, etc.). This week, I received a notice that the Mozilla Open Badges Backpack (which was a handy place to transfer badges earned in different platforms) is closing up, and that things will move to Badgr. The email included a file of all my badges, so I figured I would put them into a collage — sort of a Badge of Badges.

Mya Goldberg’s latest novel, feast your eyes, is non-traditionally told, just how I like my novels. Her fictional exploration of a single mother photographer and her daughter is narrated through the text and journals of a photography exhibit that the daughter has put together for her dead mother, so the text of this book is a collection of journal entries, photographer titles and dates, letters and other writings.

What we never see are the photographs that inform those texts.

And so, as you read feast your eyes, your mind wanders to imagine the images that became the backbone of the story centered on Lillian, whose work as a photographer of her young daughter, Samantha, catapults her to unwanted fame and even prison, for a stretch. This notoriety comes because some of the photos, taken in her home and shared in one of her first public shows, feature a young Samantha in nearly naked form, in childhood poses around their house. The community uproar over pornography versus art rears its ugly head early in the novel, and threads its way through right to the very end of the story.

With that controversy, as well as another controversial image of a bedridden Lillian following an abortion in the days before Roe vs Wade (which is now under fire again in our country, making the reading of these sections even more harrowing) as the backdrop, the novel explores a photographer’s life of viewing the world through a lens, and the struggle to balance what goes public and what stays private, and who has a say in which path is chosen. The voices of both Lillian and Samantha mingle in the texts here, as both seek to understand the other.

This structure and form creates a powerful story, with the formatting of the novel giving plenty of breathing room for the complicated relationship that the mother and daughter have, driven by wonder and art and regret, and ultimately, love.

Peace (what we can’t always see),
Kevin

PS — from an NPR interview, Goldberg explains how she used real photographs to inspire the story.

I was looking through these books constantly for inspiration. Occasionally, there’d be a photograph that was just, like, this photograph is perfect, I want to use it. So the description you’re getting in the book is the description of an actual street photograph. Other times, I would see a photograph, and one corner of it would be what I wanted my photograph to be. So in my mind, I would enlarge it, and that would become my photograph … other times, I would see a setting, and I would sub out one kind of person for another kind of person, or put my own people in the setting and that became my photograph, and other times, yes, I did just make it up. So it’s a combination of all those things. — Myla Goldberg

In our CLMOOC community, we periodically send postcards to each other as a way to stay connected on paper, with a stamp, and mailbox delivery. Some of us do it more frequently than others, and I have lapsed a bit on getting postcards out the door. (See a post I wrote about why we do this postcard exchange) There are more than 60 people on the mailing list right now, which is pretty neat. Not everyone is active, of course, which is to be expected.

I figured my work with the upcoming Write Out initiative — an offshoot of CLMOOC, in a way — gave me an opening, or inspiration, to use some artistic National Park postcards as a invitation for folks to consider joining us for place-based writing and the National Day on Writing in October with Write Out. Write Out is a two-week place-based writing initiative.

Yesterday, I mailed out nearly 40 postcards to the CLMOOC folks who are on the list and live in the US, and then I sent a handful more to folks outside the US because I didn’t want those friends who regularly send me postcards to feel left out. Write Out certainly does not have to be US-centered, but most of the focused outreach will be between National Writing Project sites and the National Park Service.

If you were on the postcard list and live in the US, keep an eye out for a park postcard.

My friend, Sheri, wrote about public art sculptures in city blocks, and referenced a piano for playing on the sidewalk. I’ve been seeing more and more of these (although not yet in my city, which is interesting, since it is so heavily tilted to the arts). She shared a few images, and something stirred about a memory of my great-grandmother whistling a song as she made us tea in her home.

Sheri gave me permission to use her photo and I composed a few lines on piano. This song is not the melody of my grandmother, necessarily, but there are faint echoes of memory.

Notice, now, the keys,
the colors of the box, the way your eyes get drawn
to sound

You sit down,
curious – a muse of the streets –
a single note played,
speaks volumes

time rewinded,
your grandmother’s room,
the tune she whistled while making you tea,
you see

There’s a boatload of good suggestions in Cartooning by Ivan Brunetti on the art of comics/cartoons (terms which he uses interchangeable but which in my mind are different — I think of comics as Calvin and Hobbes and cartoons as The Jetsons — this is no doubt influenced by a childhood of Sunday Comics followed by Sunday Morning television). Brunetti has put a semester-long graduate level course into this small book, with chapters of overview and activities replacing actual desk time at a university.

It’s a fair trade-off.

I had been reading this book earlier this summer because some other friends in a splinter of DS106 and CLMOOC were also reading the book, and we were all doing some of the activities.

I love the concept of comics for the way visuals can help tell a story or make a point or create a joke, but my patience with making the art necessary on paper is thin, and my drawing talents, slim. I’m more apt to use apps or online comic makers, a move that would raise Brunetti’s ire.

I’m not sure Brunetti helped me on this weakness as an artist, but the blame is not with him. It’s all on me. Still, his professorial and rather authoritative tone — do this, don’t do this, in a way in which I could almost see his finger pointing at me — sort of put me off on him as a teacher in the early going. He name-drops comic artist Chris Ware a bit too much for me, too, but then redeems himself in my eyes with a lovely dedication of the book to Charles Schultz.

Since I wasn’t in the actual classroom, I began to skip around a bit (one of his earliest “no no no” in the book, where he nearly demands the reader follow him in sequence or risk injury. Ok. I exaggerate. But he does make it clear, following him in sequence is important). Yeah. No. That’s not how I learn. I’m affiliated with DS106, for goodness sake. I skip around. Liberally.

But, given all that resistance to his teaching style, I recognized early on that Brunetti definitely knows the field, and his advice on the art of making comics and writing visual stories, and of the ways one must consider the placement of lines and characters and dialogue, and more, is all very valuable and intriguing. It’s clear early on that he has thought through a lot of this on his own and in college courses that he has taught, and his own mentor comics in the book are interesting as examples to consider.

I proceeded to do a handful of his assignments, to explore his ideas, and I found the ones I did to be valuable and fun. Maybe if I had spent the hours necessary, as he demands, on the lessons, things would have come out more polished and clean and thoughtful. But I took some valuable ideas from Cartooning, and what more could you ask for?

I have not read Jane Alison’s work before, but her latest — Meander Spiral Explode (Design and Pattern In Narrative) — has me curious what kind of experimentation she might do in her own fiction. Here, she leads us on an inquiry into patterns and design of stories that reach beyond the traditional narrative arc.

You know, very linear. This one:

Instead, she explores the other ways that stories might develop, and in doing so, Alison surfaces not just experimentation in fiction, but insightful ways to think about character and plot, and writing. She focuses mainly on the three aspects of her title: Meandering, Spiraling, Exploding and adds in Networking and Fractals, too.

This is a short, simplified explanation of my take-away of her ideas:

Stories meander when the narrative zigs and zags, from different perspectives or different points of view, when the writer has a place to get to, but is content to take their time. In fact, time is a key element here, and Alison’s deconstruction of how a writer can use time was fascinating.

Stories spiral when a writer uses repeating phrases and themes, and circles back on ideas repeatedly, sometimes slightly hidden and sometimes not. A story that spirals either moves towards its core or center, or it begins there and then shifts outward, giving the reader a different way of seeing what is happening.

Stories explode (or are radials) when they move from a central point, but move away at different speeds of time and direction, so that there is something keeping the story solid, but the anchor is faint. The radial points of the narrative connect, if only slightly.

Networking, or cells, are designs in which the frame of the story’s parts are nearly identical in design – one echoes another — and each part builds with the others to create the larger narrative arc.

Fractal stories start at a single place — an idea or theme — and then slowly and then suddenly expand out with near mathematical certainly, so that the first piece was merely a seed for what comes next, and so on.

The book is packed with fiction excerpts that Alison uses as examples of her thinking, and these small pieces of writing were interesting to read and think about, particularly in context of her insights. As a writer, I am now thinking about a story I have been working on — and how I might reframe its design — and as a teacher of young writers, I wonder how I might introduce different story arc techniques beyond the traditional plot design we often use (the one above).

Peace (in text and beyond),
Kevin

PS — At a point in her book, Alison notes that a friend sometimes takes her writing and transforms it into pieces of music. I was curious. Then, I found this musical adaption of Meander Spiral Explode on Youtube, and it fascinates me to no end.

This is what the composer — Christopher Cerrone — wrote as text with the video:

In April 2019, my friend Tim Horvath, a novelist, texted me, “Do you know Jane Alison’s ‘Meander, Spiral, Explode’? It’s a book that focuses on unusual structural elements in novels.” I always trust Tim’s suggestions, and I tore through the book over the next few days, finding it unique and deeply insightful. I experienced what Melville called “the shock of recognition”—seeing someone describe your own efforts (in this case, an in-progress percussion concerto) without ever having seen a note of it.The three words of the title seemed to pertain specifically to each movement of my concerto. The first movement—while dramatic and intense—seems to meander through different landscapes, where the gunshot-like sound of four wooden slats morphs into marimbas and bowed vibraphones while changing volume, key, and context. The second movement (played without pause after the first) is structured like a double helix. A rising scale on two vibraphones slowly expands, speeds up, and finally blossoms into a sea of polyrhythms. As for the last movement (again played without pause): the explosion seems fairly self-evident. A single exclamation point ejects lines of 16th-notes into the ether which return, again and again, to a white-hot core. The propulsive patterns in this movement constantly shift emphasis but always maintain energy. The end of the work brings us back to the first three notes of the piece, suggesting one more shape that Jane Alison discusses in her book: a fractal. The simple shape of the opening turns out to have contained the entire form of the work to come.

Wow. I was really blown away by Song for A Whale by Lynn Kelly. I bought this book on a whim, because I liked the gorgeous cover art and I am interested in any books with “songs” and music. I’m glad it caught my attention and that I read it. It’s lovely.

Song for A Whale is a beautifully-told story that centers on Iris, a 12 year old deaf girl struggling to make her way in a world of the hearing, and becoming more and more frustrated by the walls between those worlds. At school and at home. With a knack for fixing anything electrical — she can disassemble things faster than you can turn on the power and spends her hours at the junkyard looking for parts — Iris loves old radios, in particular, as she finds connections between the vibrations of sound – the way the waves of frequency move through the wires, which she senses through touch — and her own soundless world.

When Iris learns about a whale whom scientists reason to be either lost or not part of any pod due to its off-beat song (and maybe its designation as a mixed breed of whale), Iris is hooked on helping this whale know it is cared about. She decides first to write a song for Blue 55 (as the whale is known) in the frequency of his own song. Then she becomes determined to let Blue 55 hear the song she has written for him, even though it means heading out on an unexpected journey to Alaska with her mourning grandmother, without knowledge of Iris’ parents.

There’s so much to love here — from Iris as a complicated adolescent character overcoming odds through perseverance, to her passion for ocean science and mechanical engineering, to the need to connect to nature’s oddballs like Blue 55, to how sound and music might emerge as connecting points between people and the natural world.

This book is perfect for the middle school classroom, and the story gives thoughtful and emotional insights into the difficulty of fitting in, and of deaf students in a spoken world. You’ll root for Iris, and for Blue 55, and for the power of making a difference in the world. You may even sing their song.